EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

I could accuse Anna of espionage because she was working for Jade Envy, but I couldn’t tell them how I knew. Instead, I had to build a reasonable yet circumstantial case to point them in the right direction. Such an investigation could take months. On the outside chance that we got lucky and caught her in the act, I would be vindicated and hailed as a hero for stopping an American spy. If Anna tried to accuse me, I would deny it. Jade Envy wouldn’t have told Anna the results of his meeting with me, and he wouldn’t come to her defense during a public trial. The most surprising part was that Anna was willing to play such a direct role in the approach to me, knowing that it would reveal her work with the Chinese. She might have been confident I wouldn’t say no, or the Chinese might be willing to burn her for this one shot.

All of this might sound reasonable—I had correctly advised them that Anna was a Chinese spy—but it concealed what I was ultimately trying to avoid: the Chinese revealing their derogatory information on me if I refused to cooperate. Therefore, for this ruse to continue, there was one thing I had to do before delivering the new security patches to the J6.

The drive from Cyber Command to the Pentagon was eerily uneventful.

Despite our propensity to project our inner world, events in the outer one rarely reflected the turmoil within. After powering down my phone, I took a circuitous route, stopped at a convenience store to buy a diet soda, and checked my rear-view mirror intermittently to ensure that no one was following me. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which anyone would dedicate a surveillance team to follow me, but I always took precautions.

I made an aggressive U-turn before heading south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, with no surveillance vehicles noted. The challenge in detecting surveillance was not allowing statistically normal events to spook you or make you see things that weren’t there.

To avoid this, Intelligence Officers were taught to sift through the noise, to know with a high degree of confidence whether they were clean.

I memorized my approach to a mall underground parking lot without security cameras, where Jade Envy was sitting shotgun in a parked car. I parked in the adjacent space, lowered my window to hand Jade Envy the laptop, and observed in silence as a technician in the back seat booted it up and inserted a USB drive. They were smart enough to know that I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat.

The technician nodded approvingly, removed the USB drive, and shut down the laptop. Jade Envy returned it to me, along with a piece of paper with instructions for the next meeting.

“See you soon,” he said.

And just like that, in an underground mall parking lot, Jade Envy accomplished what some might consider one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 21st century. Under normal circumstances, I would have included this operation in the Museum of Modern Spycraft, except for what I had planned—and what he didn’t know.

To avoid doing something stupid during my exit, like hitting a pillar or squealing the tires, I took a deep breath, eased the car back in reverse, paused in neutral, and shifted to drive. The surprising part was it wasn’t difficult to do.

I guess my heart and mind hadn’t yet fully digested the gravity of my crime.

My arrival at the J6 in the Pentagon was uneventful. The office was sparsely filled with the night shift holding down the fort. I glanced across the room where Anna had been sitting, seeing her desk had been cleared out. I waved at someone on the secure side of the room and raised the laptop. They buzzed me in and led me to the same table to take care of business.

The beta male technician with eccentric attire opened the package for a new USB drive but was interrupted by Colonel O’Connor.

“Welcome, Colonel Reed,” he said and turned to the technician. “Please allow me.” He opened the laptop, powered it up, and inserted the USB drive. “The folks here are raving about your big success. You have no idea how much trouble you saved us by stopping that cyberattack.”

“Anytime,” I said as we watched the status bar move past 50%—kudos to him for working long hours and setting a good example to the troops.

As the status bar got close to 100%, O’Connor hit a sequence of keystrokes. He removed the USB drive, powered down the computer, and lowered the screen. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you.” I grabbed the laptop and tucked it under my arm as I walked to the exit. “Oh, hey,” I said and turned, as if I’d just thought of something. “Please keep this close hold, but we have credible information that the Chinese are planning something big. I’m not a technical guy, but if there’s any indication of a cyberattack, you might want to shut down the system for routine maintenance. My guess is these security patches won’t hold any longer than the previous ones.”

With the system down, the Chinese couldn’t execute their attack—easy and brilliant.

I had no intention of allowing my misdeeds to actually damage U.S. national security.

O’Connor stroked his chin. “I’m not sure that will work, but we’ll keep it in mind. Cheers.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I returned the laptop to Cyber Command. History was replete with stories of diplomats and Intelligence Officers losing computers filled with secrets. The best way to avoid this was to keep them secure at all times, not hidden under hotel mattresses. Cyber Command technicians were waiting for me when I arrived, promptly confirming the serial number. Many civilians might struggle with this lack of trust, but it was the cost of doing business in defense of national security.

I didn’t understand all the technical details but my understanding was that all the work on these security patches had to be done on